MergeBot: Activision's Merge and Resolve Infrastructure

Source control is one of the foundational elements in a software's lifecycle. Unfortunately, code merges and conflict resolution can be challenging, especially in a game development environment with numerous large files scattered across branches that must be kept in sync. This talk serves as a postmortem on a tool that emerged from our ongoing work to smoothly integrate Perforce changelists between streams, all while ensuring it doesn't disrupt our continuous development pipeline. The presentation will delve into the architecture of the tool, the challenges encountered while making it as hands-off as possible, the complexities involved in the file resolution process, which needed to be universally accessible, and a discussion of the compromises we had to make while developing and customizing the tool to suit our needs.

This talk was originally presented at GDC 2024 on March 21, 2024.

View the presentation slides HERE

For those with access to GDC Vault, the full presentation can be viewed HERE